Design and manufacturing cycles in the prior art have included several product redesign iterations to minimize the manufacturing product costs and cycle times and maximize the product quality. This process is very costly and time consuming. Today's competitive market require minimum product manufacturing costs and high product quality with minimum time to market cycle.
Over the past few years, quality has been addressed with process capability tools such as SSDR (Six Sigma Design Review) and Process Capability Library (PCL). The SSDR tool was developed at Texas Instruments and has been used and published by the International Casting Institute.
The PCL is a process capability tool for quality analysis. This is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,452,218 of Tucker, et al. Entitled “System and Method for Determining Quality Analysis of Fabrication and/or Assembly Design Using Shop Capability Data”, issued Sep. 19, 1995. This patent is incorporated herein by reference.